SGS.net

A presentation by Fabian Simillion & Pietro Caltabiano

For SharePoint Club – Suisse Romande

Vevey, November 2006

2

Agenda

� Context

� Customizations

� Deployment

� Performance improvements

� Questions & answers

3

Context

1) SGS

� Worldwide leader in inspection, verification, testing and

certification

� More than 46’000 employees

� Presence in 140+ countries

� Network of 1’000+ offices and laboratories

� Organized around 10 business lines

� Lotus Notes phase-out

� No pre-existing intranet

4

Context

2) SGS.net

One centralized portal

with significant

customization

Hundreds of team sites

hosted on several server farms

with limited customization

5

Customizations

1) Navigation features Cross-navigation

Contextual navigation

Left-hand navigation Breadcrumb trail

6

Customizations

2) Country sub-portals

Contextual navigationDynamic image

Country imageCountry flag

7

Customizations

3) Content syndication

� Corporate content pulled down from local level

� Mechanisms to push local content up to corporate level

8

Customizations

Lessons learned

� Pro’s

• Navigation features very appreciated

• Country sub-portals used as browser starting page

• Top-down content syndication appreciated by management

� Con’s

• Generated a lot of empty areas

• Negative impact on performance

• Bottom-up content syndication unsuccessful

• Makes evolution more difficult

� Open issues

• Sometimes used to make a « bad » content organization

more acceptable

9

Deployment

1) Architecture

10

Deployment

2) Centralized team site creation

11

Deployment

3) Decentralized content management

Intranet Group

LocalIT

Localusers

CorporateIT

CorporateBusiness / Function

LocalBusiness / Function

Corporateusers

12

Deployment

Lessons learned

� Pro’s

• Team sites intensively used

• Effective collaboration work taking place in team sites

• Central access to all team sites through portal

� Con’s

• Performance problems on portal

• Portal usage not satisfactory

• Portal search not very effective

• Lots of missing features compared to Lotus Notes

� Open issues

• Network load balancing

• Usage statistics

13

Performance improvements

1) SGS.net corporate portal home page

� Two front end web servers with NLB

� No IIS compression

� The page was About 1200 Kb

� The http sessions were in total: #69 (requests &

responses)

� Time to get the page with IE6 from Geneva: quite

immediate, less than a sec

� Time to get the page with IE6 in Secaucus, New Jersey

38s, the first time

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Performance improvements

2) Actions taken

Data transferred after clearing cache Data transferred with caching enabled

22KB300KB

First time access Reload or Access after that

� Big-IP

• Big-IP for network load balancing, compression and also to stop losing

performances in the datacenter (NLB was broadcasting when STSADM backups

start)

• Compression resulted in reduction of 70% of size of page transferred on the network

� IIS Caching increased

• Javascript, CSS, gifs, etc… are cached on the client (~280KB)

• Only HTML and headers are downloaded when accessing the page (~22KB)

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Performance improvements

3) Other actions taken

� Actions performed

• Applied latest service packs for OS & DB

• Increased SGS.net infrastructure internal network card from 100MB to

1GB

• Re-Ghosted unghosted pages

• Removed heavy components on home page: animated .gif, .bmp, .swf

• Fixed http 401 errors (not authorized)

• Asked to stay with standard cache settings for IE6

• Vanity server redirection modified to go straight to the right page for all

countries.

– ch.sgs.net point to http://sgs.net/C0/Switzerland/default.aspx

� SGS.net home page is now comparable to an OTB portal home page

• 300KB compared to 220KB

• 59 http requests compared to 42 http requests

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Performance improvements

4) Results achieved

January 2006 June 2006

SGS.net

Thank you for your attention.